Book Excerpt: The Art of the Con

The Art of the Con: Avoiding Offender Manipulation, by Gary Cornelius, is aimed toward helping correctional staff understand offenders and their characteristics, behavior and culture. It shows how staff and volunteers can maintain authority and control by resisting manipulation. For more information on the book or to order a copy of your own, check out ACA.org.

Do you remember the classic television series The Twilight Zone? Every week, for many years, millions of people would tune in and be fascinated by stories of the strange and offbeat. In the introduction, host Rod Serling would say, “You unlock this door with the key of imagination.” Many still consider this series to be television at its best—an art form.

The same holds true for the subject of offender manipulation—it is an art form whose boundaries are only those of imagination. In previous chapters, we saw how offenders live by using people. Many have antisocial behavioral ten- dencies and employ manipulation while doing time under correctional supervi- sion. This chapter will explore the process of manipulation and the imaginative means offenders use to “get over” on us.

Educators believe that one of the best ways to learn a skill is through exam- ples. In this chapter, we present examples. We hope readers will remember them so that they can resist manipulation. Let us look at this form of The Twilight Zone and remember—it could happen to you.

Manipulation Defined

A crucial step in resisting inmate manipulation is to simply break the term down into its components and apply them to the discipline of corrections, recall- ing information from prior chapters. When many correctional professionals hear the word “manipulate,” they think of terms such as “fool,” “get over,” “slink,” “sneak,” and “lie.” In reality, the definition is quite clear. According to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary (2008), to manipulate means “to control or play upon by artful, unfair or insidious means, especially to one’s own advan- tage.” Corrections staff must understand each of these components, based on examples they hear or situations they experience. One way a staff person can learn is by being “burned” or hearing of others who have been “burned.”

To manipulate people means to deceive them. Deception comes in two forms (Knowles 1992):

1. Verbal deception: lying. Offenders lie rather than tell the truth. Often, these lies are not very sophisticated or subtle. In fact, they may have trouble defending the lie when pressed by a competent staff member. For example:

• An offender sees his street friend in a cellblock up the hall. He tells the classification staff that he is being threatened in his cellblock and asks if he could be moved into a particular block (the one he wants). If the counselor is alert, she keeps the offender out of the block, calls down to another officer or inmates who she feels are honest, and begins to investigate. She discovers that the inmate lied and takes appropriate disciplinary action. Another counselor may just listen sympathetically, “buy” the story, and move the offender.

• Another lie might come from an offender who says she desperately needs a noncollect outside call because her child is sick. What she really wants is to get a phone call to her spouse without paying for it—hopefully in an office where she will have privacy. An astute officer will ask, “What’s the illness? Has he or she seen a doctor? How did you find out? Is the child in the hospital—if so, which one?” Alternatively, “Let me check it out with my supervisor and I’ll get back to you.”

• One offender in a jail insisted that he was on the vegetarian list and said that he was not to get the lunchtime bologna sandwich, but a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He only was truthful when the cor- rectional officer headed for the phone to call the kitchen. The reason he lied was that he did not like bologna.

2. Situational deception: This is more involved and complicated. Offenders engaging in situational deception will not just tell lies, but they will purposely mislead the staff member. Situational deception goes on constantly. It is so low- key and subtle that it is hard to spot. Inmates may fool even the most alert and competent staff person. For example:

• An offender has to get a message to his codefendant in a unit that he passes on the way to his own unit, two doors down from the post cor- rectional officer’s desk. He promises two offenders some canteen items if they will start a verbal argument further down the hall. The correctional officer’s back is turned; the offender slips the note in. One nice payoff is that no one was written up. The “argument” between the other two offenders cools off.

Offenders can spend a long time devising and carrying out a plan and all the while manipulating the staff into thinking everything is fine, they are obeying the rules, and they are good inmates. Consider these examples.

In one prison, three convicted murderers took four months to dig a sixteen- foot deep, thirty-two-foot long tunnel that ran from beneath the prison green- house to the other side of the prison wall. Inmate ingenuity was at work—the tunnel had electric lighting, fans to circulate air and provide ventilation, and even a radio. Police soon arrested one of the convicts, but he had bragged to a motorist who he abducted about how he and the other inmates disposed of the dirt, a telltale sign of tunnel digging. They had convinced the prison officers that it was peat moss and rich topsoil, and the officers took the dirt home for their own gardens (Sweet 1994).